Quebec’s Jean-Marc Vallée, director of Big Little Lies, Dallas Buyers Club, dead at 58

His representative Bumble Ward said Sunday that Vallée died suddenly in his cabin outside Quebec City over the weekend.

Vallée was acclaimed for his naturalistic approach to filmmaking, directing stars including Reese Witherspoon, Nicole Kidman, Amy Adams and Jake Gyllenhaal over the past decade.

He directed Emily Blunt in 2009’s The Young Victoria and became a sought-after name in Hollywood after Dallas Buyers Club, featuring Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto, earned six Academy Awards nominations, including best picture.

He often shot with natural light and hand-held cameras and gave actors freedom to improvise the script and move around within a scene’s location. The crew roamed up and down the Pacific Crest Trail to shoot Witherspoon in 2014’s Wild.

They can move anywhere they want, the filmmaker said of his actors in a 2014 interview with The Associated Press. It’s giving the importance to storytelling, emotion, characters. I try not to interfere too much. I don’t need to cut performances. Often, the cinematographer and I were like, ‘This location sucks. It’s not very nice. But, hey, that’s life.‘

He re-teamed with Witherspoon to direct the first season of Big Little Lies in 2017, and directed Adams in 2018’s Sharp Objects, also for HBO. Vallée won DGA awards for both.

Vallée’s French Canadian films helped him catch Hollywood’s attention. They include C.R.A.Z.Y., which was released in 2005, and the romantic drama Café de Flore, which garnered 13 Genie nominations in 2012 and won three.

In an interview in 2018, the Montreal-born filmmaker said his roots gave him a unique perspective on the industry.

Being a foreigner in the States, I have to do more homework to try to really get into the culture, understand the culture, and understand the world of the characters that I am trying to depict. And so I become a student, he said .

The Associated Press